May your Holiday Adventures
only bring you health
and happiness
and happiness
this Holiday Season!
This is our 15th studio christmas card. Hard to believe it! The fact that the boys still want to collaborate on these things makes it even more special for me.
This year, Rocketboy and Gears decided continue the Hardy Boys theme with Rocketboy swinging out over a chasm to save The Man In Red from Abomidable Snow Yetis. We had two timelapse cameras running during what was a fairly simple green screen shoot. Of course, the real tricky part was figuring out how to safely suspend Rocketboy from the beam in the studio. There are rules about these things. But, especially, there is the Mom to answer to if something goes a little sideways.
Like all of these types of projects, the work gets divided equally into the planning stage where we figure out all the fine details, the preproduction stage where we gather props and map out the positions, the actual shoot itself, and the post production or photoshop stage. If anything, the shoot itself was the shortest and easiest part of the whole thing.
Luckily, most of our props were either in their wardrobe already or laying around the studio from other projects. We did have to go and invest in a climbing belt so we could safely hang Rocketboy from a ceiling girder in the studio.
The longest part of this was the post production in photoshop. Just about all of the textures came from various images I had in my own library. The challenge was finding the right rocks and tweaking everything out from shadow densities to fire glows to reflections on clothing.
My thanks, as always, to the boys for their willing and eager participation in the project, to my wife, for putting up with the chaos that surrounds these events, and to YOU for encouraging our crazy projects.
Thanks and don't forget to appreciate the project!
